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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The pleasant, bizarre filmmaker who gave us the Lynchian world insists that now, more than ever, we must face the darkness.
Nov 6, 2001 | There is a car wash on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles not far from David Lynch's home in the Hollywood Hills. Its marquee is supposed to read "God Bless America," but the 'B' has fallen off. The message that's left -- "God Less America" -- is an accordingly odd mixture of eerie and comical. In other words, it makes for a perfect Lynchian moment.
Forget Oscars and Golden Globes, thumbs up and four stars: The greatest accolade for any filmmaker is immortality through the common adjective. There is no finer tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, for example, than the acceptance of "Hitchcockian" as a term denoting unease, suspense and intrigue. Likewise, "Felliniesque" elicits visions of chaotic, colorful, circuslike surroundings, and "Bergmanesque" can only mean oppressive melancholy and the absence of God.
But the list essentially stops there, save for the one contemporary filmmaker to conceive an entire world so unquestionably his own that you can only call it by name. "Lynchian" has seeped into our consciousness as a bizarre intersection of the macabre and the mundane, once described by novelist David Foster Wallace this way:
"Some guy killing his wife in and of itself doesn't have much of a Lynchian tang to it, though if it turns out the guy killed his wife over something like ... an obdurate refusal to buy the particular brand of peanut butter the guy was devoted to, the homicide could be described as having Lynchian elements."
It's easy to see where David Lynch's gift for juxtaposing innocence and depravity comes from. In his office on a recent afternoon, his gravity-defying pompadour backlit by the Southern California sun, Lynch is as amiable and optimistic as an astronaut. At various instances he calls me "Buddy" and "Buster," without a trace of guile in his voice. Longtime members of Lynch's film crews are among the most loyal and devoted in Hollywood, and the filmmaker enjoys a quiet family life with editor/producer Mary Sweeney. As reputations go, his is remarkable only for how slowly he drives on the freeway. Yet a few feet away sits a collection of his own morbid paintings in menacing hues of blood red and dirt brown. One canvas has a rolled-up gauze bandage glued to its surface, while another has the word "hide" scribbled over and over again.
And then there are his films. Collectively, they form one of the most ominous visions in cinema. Lynch's latest, "Mulholland Drive," opened nationwide to overwhelmingly favorable reviews, most notably from several critics who have not always been kind. But it's more than just a critical victory for the writer-director: It's outright revenge. Lynch first conceived "Mulholland Drive" as a television series for ABC, the network on which his "Twin Peaks" became arguably the most original programming ever to appear on small screens. But nervous executives canceled the "Mulholland Drive" show before the pilot was ever aired. Undeterred, Lynch eventually got Canal Plus to buy the rights, proceeded to shoot some new footage and turned it into a feature film.
"It's like having a child who had to have a serious operation that made it OK, and maybe even a little bit better because of the operation," Lynch says, exhaling cigarette smoke. "It looked like this project was dead for awhile. Then I got really lucky as these ideas came to me. Now it feels like this was the way it was always meant to be."
Intriguing as a "Mulholland Drive" series may be, it's amazing that he ever wound up working in this most conventional and formulaic of mediums in the first place. Throughout his career, Lynch has favored a manner of abstraction many moviegoers and even some critics find confounding. Of Lynch's 1997 film "Lost Highway," a stunning if enigmatic treatise on identity, revenge and sexual frustration, Roger Ebert wrote, "It's a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences. I've seen it twice, hoping to make sense of it. There is no sense to be made of it."
